Experimental Ethics

Alan C. Elms

experimental ethics:
issues raised by obedience research

Science leads to powers whose exercise spells
disaster and nuclear weapons are not the deepest of these. In the great
strides in the biological sciences, and far more still in the early
beginnings of an understanding of man's psyche, of his beliefs, his
learning, his memory and his probable action, one can see the origin of
still graver problems of good and evil.

--J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoted in the New York Times, May 23, 1956

Psychology thrusts no new moral dilemmas upon
us. At most, by increasing possibilities of prediction and control, it
demands that we attend more seriously to the solution of old moral and
philosophical dilemmas.

--Raymond B. Cattell, The Scientific Analysis of Personality

In most of Stanley Milgram's research, compliant
volunteers engaged not in constructive but in destructive obedience,
and seemed willing to abdicate their moral responsibility as they did
so. But of course they were not freed from moral responsibility just
because the experimenter demanded that they obey. Neither the moral
codes of most modem religions nor the deliberations of such bodies as
the Nuremburg tribunal would grant them that freedom. Milgram, in
exploring the external conditions that produce such destructive
obedience, the psychological processes that lead to such attempted
abdications of responsibility, and the means by which defiance of
illegitimate authority can be promoted, seems to me to have done some
of the most morally significant research in modem psychology. A number
of ministers who have based sermons on this research, and the Germans
and Israelis who were the first to publish translations of Milgram's
papers, apparently agree.

But by an odd twist of moral sensibilities, the Milgram
studies have themselves been more extensively attacked on ethical
grounds than any other recent psychological research. Part of the
criticism has come simply from coffee-break moralizers, who feel their
own vague personal codes of ethics to have been somehow bruised. But
the studies have also been used as stepping-off points for serious
discussions of the psychologist's ethical responsibilities, both to his
research participants and to society at large.

Psychologists had not ignored the moral and ethical
issues involved in experimentation prior to Milgram's research. The
American Psychological Association's Ethical Standards of Psychologists
has gone through several editions, with another major revision in
progress (Ad Hoc Committee on Ethical Standards, 1971). Several APA
divisions have additional codes of ethics, or committees to investigate
ethical violations; and a good many college psychology departments have
their own machinery for policing the ethical practices of faculty and
student researchers. An APA committee investigated Milgram's obedience
research not long after its first appearance in print (holding up his
APA membership application for a year in the meantime), and judged it
ethically acceptable. But the criticisms have continued, partly because
the APA code is foggy enough to allow for wide differences of opinion,
partly perhaps because really clear cases of violation seldom come
along and some psychologists were looking for a convenient
battleground. One's moral purity is hard to establish nowadays without
a good fight.

The first and most widely published criticism of the
Milgram studies, by Diana Baumrind (1964), raised several key issues.
Milgram (1964b) has published a careful rebuttal of her specific
points, but the general issues hold implications for other
psychological research as well, and are worth considering at length.

THE ISSUE OF “ENTRAPMENT”

Is the psychologist ever justified in leading a
volunteer into a situation the volunteer has not anticipated and to
which he has not given his prior consent? It's tempting here simply to
generalize from good medical research practice and argue (as Baumrind
does) that the volunteer should always give his "informed consent" in
advance, that he should be told what's going to happen and what the
dangers are so he can decide whether he really wants to participate or
not. This may be feasible when you want to inject a bacillus into
people, because telling them about it won't do much to the bacillus one
way or the other. But if you want to study the conditions under which a
volunteer will obey an authority's orders, you'd better not tell him,
"I want to see when you'll obey me and when you'll disobey me," or you
might as well go play a quick game of ping-pong instead. The same is
true for social conformity experiments, and in fact for a large
proportion of the questions studied by social and personality
psychologists.

This doesn't mean that deception in psychological
experiments is a trivial problem, or above reproach. Misrepresentation
or lying, in the service of science as well as anywhere else, is both
unfair and possibly damaging to the recipient of the lie, and may
ultimately harm the deceiver's interests as well. As more and more
deception is used and becomes known in psychology, potential groups of
volunteers are likely to build up layers of distrust toward any kind of
unusual or particularly demanding situation, for fear of suddenly being
told something like "Smile, you're on Candid Camera!" Not only will
this inhibit spontaneous behavior; not only does it cause serious
public relations problems for psychologists (particularly with their
students); it also renders the results of many psychological
experiments even outside the laboratory thoroughly suspect. I would
distrust the results of any new social-psychological experiment using
student volunteers from Harvard, Yale, Michigan, or several other
over-researched universities, unless I knew much more than most
experimenters learn about how the volunteers actually saw the
experimental situation. Many researchers now make an attempt to
question volunteers after an experiment about their perception of
deception; but the attempt is often directed more toward reassuring the
experimenter about the efficacy of his cover story than toward
obtaining useful information about the incidence of doubt.

What can be done, then, to protect both volunteers and
psychologists? An easy suggestion is to reduce deception to a minimum.
Some psychologists have gone the other way: I know of a study where the
volunteer was led to believe he was helping the psychologist dupe
another volunteer who presumably thought he was helping dupe a third
volunteer (and maybe there was a fourth one in there somewhere), when
of course only volunteer number one was really being fooled and the
others were experimental confederates. It may have been vital to go to
such lengths in that particular case; but I think it's safe to say
there's much more deception going on than need be. Part of it is simple
one-upmanship; the psychologist feels good knowing a few things the
volunteer doesn't know. I've done research myself in which I laid on
perhaps twice as much deception as was necessary, to make the
experiment more stimulating to my potential readers. I can say now that
I wasn't mature enough then to know better, and that I won't do it
again, and that I hope others won't either. But is that enough?

Herbert Kelman (1967) and others have suggested that we
might instead resort to roleplaying: tell our volunteers what we're
trying to study, and then have them go through the experimental
situation while pretending they don't know what it's all about. This
approach assumes that sophomores and other volunteers already know all
there is to know about their own probable responses in real life, or
that they will do the same things in a simulated situation as in a
realistic one, both of which are patently wrong. I've already mentioned
two occasions within the Milgram series alone that indicate the likely
invalidity of such roleplaying studies: the fact that nonparticipants,
even highly trained psychiatrists, are miserable predictors of real
participants’ responses, and the discovery that Milgram
participants, asked to describe what they would do in other situations
of destructive obedience, often gave answers totally discrepant with
their behavior in the obedience situation. Maybe they would do all
those things; but I prefer to believe their real behavior, even in a
laboratory experiment, over their roleplayed behavior. Milgram also
asked volunteers in another study (1965a) what they'd be likely to do
in the basic obedience situation, without actually putting them through
it. Nobody said he'd go higher than 300 volts, though of course many
real participants went to 450 volts. Roleplaying looks like one of the
worst of many possible resolutions to the deception problem (see also
Freedman, 1969).

So we have a set of studies such as Milgram's, which
must involve some deception if they are to be done at all. Once we've
limited that deception to the necessary minimum, is that all we can do?
Just say, "Oh well, deception is necessary," and drop it?

No, we can still do a couple of things. One is to make
it clear to the volunteer that any time the experiment becomes
distasteful to him, calls upon him to do things he would not willingly
do, he can get out of it. In a medical study this might not be very
useful, if the patient is already under anesthesia or has his belly
open or a needle in his spine. But for consenting adults in a
psychology experiment, it can be made a live option throughout, and a
number of college psychology departments make it an alternative to
"informed consent." In the Milgram study, all volunteers were
explicitly told at the beginning that they were being paid simply for
coming, not for completing the experimental procedure, and they were
paid in advance to free them from financial pressure to continue. In
other types of experiments where willingness to obey is not an issue,
volunteers can also be told repeatedly that they are free to stop at
any time during the experiment.

We can also tell the volunteer, as soon as possible,
what has been going on: undeceive him, so he won't go around still
believing the misrepresentations. This can often be done most feasibly
immediately after the experiment, particularly with college students
who are likely soon to scatter to the four winds. Such a practice may
still create difficulties where an experiment is spread over an
appreciable time: participants are likely to talk to other people about
their experience, if it is of any interest at all. Careful studies have
shown that even when students sign agreements that they won't tell,
volunteer performance may change significantly from those who
participate early in an experiment to those who participate late. What
Milgram initially did was a reasonable compromise: he told volunteers
as soon as their participation was over that the victim hadn't gotten
nearly as much shock as they'd thought. Then Milgram waited for several
months, until the bulk of the studies was completed, to notify
participants fully of the experiment's purpose, the extent of the
deceptions, and the early results, as well as emphasizing the value of
their participation. Volunteers who participated after the experimental
series was further along were told immediately afterward exactly what
was going on.

It's sometimes tempting not to "dehoax" volunteers at
all. That way, presumably, word doesn't get out about the study before
it's finished, the volunteer isn't made to feel like a fool for having
been duped, and psychology isn't given a bad name by publicizing all
those deceptions. According to this reasoning, maybe I shouldn't write
anything about deception here. But word will
get out sooner or later anyway, if the psychologist makes any effort to
circulate information on his research, as he properly should, or if he
trains his students at all in the techniques that research involves, as
he also properly should. Better the word get out intentionally and in
context, than be publicized as an expose several years later. If social
psychology gets a bad name simply from the dispassionate or even
sympathetic description of its research techniques, it will surely have
earned that bad name. I don't think it has earned such a name; as I've
said, experimental deception is sometimes a legitimate means to
legitimate ends, and it can be presented to volunteers in that light.
Deception will remain a technique to use in minimal fashion, only when
nothing else will get the requisite information. Most psychologists
have enough ethical distaste for deception as such to avoid it when
possible, and maybe greater publicity about it will force the rest to
devise alternate means of study. But deception need not be thought of
as a mortal sin in and of itself.

THE ISSUE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL INJURY

The question of whether it's all right to make the
volunteer feel like a fool by telling him you've tricked him brings me
to another of Baumrind's points: Milgram's assailing of volunteers'
"sensibilities." He upset them emotionally, pushed them into a
situation where they could only obey and then hate themselves for it
afterward, and all this was "potentially harmful because it could
easily effect an alteration in the subject's selfimage or ability to
trust adult authorities in the future."

The phrase "adult authorities" suggests how Baumrind
really sees Milgram volunteers: she is a child psychologist and the
volunteers are all children at heart, unable to resist the
experimenter's wiles and therefore needing protection by someone who
knows better, namely Dr. Baumrind. But of course the volunteers are
actually grown men, in full legal possession of their senses and their
wills, undrugged and faced with no physical force. If they could do
nothing but obey, Milgram would have no experiment. But they can
do something else (as the victim, by his protests, seeks to remind
them), and a goodly number of them do; it's their choice, not
Milgram's. The experimenter does demand that they obey, true; but if he
is an "adult authority," they are adult moral agents in their own
right. As Milgram (1964b) says, "I started with the belief that every
person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the
dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity
insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his
own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose
to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation
of human ideals."

Several psychological studies have been conducted where
the volunteer undergoes certain morally questionable manipulations with
no choice on his part. He is falsely told that he has homosexual
tendencies or that he is stupid or is repugnant to some group of
respected people. Baumrind herself (1967) has placed small children in
situations where they are sure to fail a task, in order to observe
their responses to failure. One might be able to justify even these
kinds of manipulations, if they are absolutely necessary to an
important scientific enterprise and if great care is taken to alleviate
afterward any misimpressions that the psychologist may have created in
his volunteers. But I would still have doubts about such techniques,
simply because the element of choice has been removed. The element of
choice remains continually present in the Milgram situation; and
choice, after all, is what makes morality.

Baumrind is distressed not only because Milgram puts his
volunteers in a situation where (she says) they can do nothing but
obey, but also because he gets them extremely excited and anxious and
upset, because the whole situation is so "traumatic." Their
disturbance, of course, is another sign that they recognize a moral
dilemma; I for one am glad that few if any delivered shocks to the
victim with cold impassiveness. But did Milgram have any right to upset
them at all?

An unfortunate tradition within certain regions of
social psychology dictates that social interactions under study should
be stripped of any real-world referents. The dynamics of a small group
discussion, for instance, may be studied by isolating volunteers in
separate cubicles and having them pass notes to each other through
little slots, in this way conducting a slow-motion argument about an
issue of absolute triviality. Such studies have their partisans, but I
am not one and I have avoided discussing them at any length in this
book, since their social relevance seems minimal. It's possible to
conduct research without raising a participant's blood pressure or
arousing his slightest concern. But since the important aspects of
human life often involve concern and heightened blood pressure, I don't
feel researchers should avoid them.

Volunteers may not always want their concerns aroused,
and we must keep the rights of the volunteer constantly in mind. But
such considerations are not completely impervious to other demands.
Just as the conformity experiment participant faces a conflict between
objective and social information, the psychologist who wishes to study
humans faces a conflict between the general value of his research, not
only to "science" but to humanity at large, and the possible harm that
participation may cause to his volunteers. He has a strong obligation
to reduce negative effects to the minimum. But must he, as Baumrind
demands, cancel his experiment if he cannot eliminate every possibility
of "permanent harm, however slight"?

Most serious students of ethics at some point reach the
conclusion that there is more than one source of ethical obligation,
whether they approach ethics from a religious viewpoint or a
philosophical or even a scientific one. You cannot use absolute words
in talking about moral obligations toward the individual or toward
society; you cannot insist on either the "greater good" or "the
individual good" with any degree of certitude. When a majority of
psychologists come to that realization, and they begin transferring
their psychological investments from their own personal moral codes to
a hard critical consideration of professional ethical complexities,
perhaps we'll attain a more honest confidence about the resolution of
our perplexing ethical decisions than we hold now. But absolute
certitude, I doubt. The medical profession, with a much longer history
of trying to deal with such issues, hasn't got there yet, and doesn't
seem about to.

Milgram, as Baumrind herself indicates, was concerned
with a very important social problem, one which has been directly
implicated not only in the physical destruction of millions of people
during the twentieth century alone, but with the moral abdication of
millions more. The ethical case for
his upsetting several hundred people in the laboratory in order to
study this problem seriously is surely much better than the case
against, though neither can at this point be established absolutely. He
does have an obligation to minimize any long-term negative effects of
such upsets as thoroughly as possible. Has he done so?

Baumrind, reading Milgram's two-sentence description of
his procedure for alleviating volunteers' emotional tensions in his
first report, didn't think so: "In view of the effects on subjects,
traumatic to a degree which Milgram himself considers nearly
unprecedented in sociopsychological experiments, his casual assurance
that these tensions were dissipated before the subject left the
laboratory is unconvincing." But the tension-dissipation procedures
were in fact anything but casual; they were, as far as I know, nearly
unprecedented in sociopsychological experiments.

The standard procedure in other sorts of experiments
involving deception has been a straightforward explanation of what the
study was all about, with the assumption that this would relieve any
disturbances; in most cases it probably has. A few experiments, such as
Asch's, have also involved discussions with the experimenter and
sometimes with his confederates afterward, to clear up any
misunderstandings and to further alleviate any obvious distress.
Milgram went well beyond that. As I've indicated previously, the
volunteer was told post-experimentally that the machine could not
administer shocks harmful to humans; the victim came out in a very
friendly mood, explaining he had been overly excited but not hurt; he
stressed he had "no hard feelings," shook the volunteer's hand at least
a couple of times, and often said he would have done the same in the
volunteer's shoes; and the experimenter explained that the volunteer's
behavior was by no means unique and indeed was what was expected in a
memory-and-learning experiment. Between experimenter and "victim," a
very effective job was done of relieving whatever tensions the
volunteer had accumulated during the experiment. Baumrind actually
complains that the experimenter was too nice: "the subject finds it
difficult to express his anger outwardly after the experimenter in a
self-acceptant but friendly manner reveals the hoax." But the
volunteers seldom indicated any thought of anger at this point, and
whatever anger existed was soon dissipated by their relief at not
having hurt the "learner," or by the volunteer-accepting (not
self-accepting) manner of both experimenter and victim. All this was
reinforced later when volunteers received the written description of
the experiment's true purpose. As Milgram says of this report, "Again
their own part in the experiments was treated in a dignified way and
their behavior in the experiment respected."

But Milgram didn't stop there. He had an extensive
program of evaluating the effectiveness of these tension-relief
procedures, in addition to the on-the-spot evaluations at the end of
each volunteer's participation. For one thing, a short questionnaire
was mailed to each volunteer along with the written report of the
research results. Most returned the questionnaire and most indicated a
continued positive response to their participation; only 1.3 per cent
indicated any negative feelings about it. In my separate interviews
with forty volunteers, conducted before the report was sent out, I
questioned them about whether they had subsequently "felt bothered in
any way about having shocked the learner," and probed gently about such
things as guilt feelings or bad dreams. Only two people indicated even
mild concern. Indeed most obedient volunteers were willing to
participate again, as either teacher or learner. A majority of the
defiant subjects interviewed were also willing to return to act as
teacher again, though they had refused to do so at some point in the
original experiment.

I didn't question these volunteers extensively about
their feelings toward the obedience research, but a psychiatrist not
otherwise connected with the studies did interview another forty in
depth a year after their participation, purposely choosing those who
seemed most likely to have suffered psychological harm from their
participation. His conclusion (as quoted in Milgram, 1964b): "None was
found by this interviewer to show signs of having been harmed by his
experience. . . . Each subject seemed to handle his task [in the
experiment] in a manner consistent with well-established patterns of
behavior. No evidence was found of any traumatic reactions." A recent
obedience study by Ring, Wallston, and Corey (1970) found a similar
absence of lingering disturbance following experimental participation,
as long as volunteers were told – as in the Milgram studies
– that the victim was not actually harmed and that their own
experimental behavior was appropriate.

In view of all these precautions and all the evidence
that they were effective, I'd say that the Milgram research, far from
being attacked for ethical shoddiness, might well be held up as a model
of how one should proceed in conducting a serious experiment on serious
human problems, with full consideration of the ethical issues involved
in experimentation. If there's anything I'd complain about, it's that
Milgram made it too easy for the obedient volunteers to ignore the
ethical implications of what they'd done, by assuring them that other
people did the same kinds of things and by implying that this was
acceptable behavior. Maybe he should have left them a little more shook
up than they were.

This raises the issue of what people consider to be
psychological harm. Baumrind's position, again, is, "I do regard the
emotional disturbance described by Milgram as potentially harmful
because it could easily effect an alteration in the subject's
self-image or ability to trust adult authorities in the future." Along
somewhat the same lines, Herbert Kelman (1967) has argued, "In general,
the principle that a subject ought not to leave the laboratory with
greater anxiety or lower self-esteem than he came with is a good one to
follow." Milgram rightly responds to the latter part of Baumrind's
statement by noting that people should not indiscriminately trust
authorities who order harsh and inhumane treatment. But what about this
matter of self-esteem? Maybe the volunteers didn't have bad dreams
later, or develop any neurotic symptoms as a result of shocking the
learner; but surely some recognized the weakness of their own ethical
systems, realized they'd proven themselves poorer human beings than
they had previously thought? And aren't you unjustly harming a person
when you lower his own evaluation of himself in this way?

Stanley Coopersmith (1967) and other psychologists have
observed in some individuals a "discrepant" or "defensive" self-esteem,
which is not based on accurate assessment of the individual's own
behavior and indeed may be concealing truths about the person that he'd
be better off knowing. I see no obligation for the psychologist to
strengthen or maintain such defensive self-esteem, though if his
actions are likely to weaken it he should be prepared to help the
individual find more realistic bases for rebuilding a positive
self-image. Self-esteem is another of those things that looks like an
absolute good at first, to the ethics-oriented thinker looking for
absolute goods, but that may prove at least partly illusory.

THE ISSUE OF INFLUENCE

Some would continue to reject such a view, arguing not
only that psychological researchers should "do no harm," but that they
should avoid intervening in an individual's behavior uninvited even if
the behavior's continuation is likely to damage the individual's own
interests or the interests of others. Kelman (1965) puts this in rather
strong terms: ". . . for those of us who hold the enhancement of man's
freedom of choice as a fundamental value, any manipulation of the
behavior of others constitutes a violation of their essential
humanity." He grants that manipulation is sometimes necessary to
achieve good ends, but insists that "even under the most favorable
conditions manipulation of the behavior of others is an ethically
ambiguous act." Certain critics of psychology extend this argument not
just to manipulating others' behavior, but to collecting information on
others' behavior. One writer has gone so far as to suggest that a
psychologist may be acting unethically simply by using his
psychological skills to draw inferences about another person in casual
interaction - much as it is a serious crime for a prizefighter to hit a
private individual with his fists.

Such critics are, however, demanding that psychologists
observe a moral absolutism that is found in no other field of human
endeavor. Sound moral judgments cannot be made in the abstract, and
when we try to make them in reality, there are nearly always
conflicting claims on conscience, as Kelman (1967) recognizes.
Psychologists in some cases (for instance in testing employees of
certain governmental agencies and private corporations) may indeed have
gone too far in invading personal privacy; but even privacy has no
absolute moral guarantees. As Ross Stagner (1967) argued in testifying
before a congressional committee on the creation of a National Social
Science Foundation:

“[G]reat social dangers cry for investigations
which may be blocked by excessive emphasis on the right of privacy.
Consider the case of the rapist, the violent criminal. As a youth he
may certainly object to ‘prying questions’ which might
reveal his explosive, destructive, antisocial tendencies. Yet society
is clearly entitled to look for measures to protect women from his
hostile sexuality. A loaded way to phrase this question is to ask how
we balance the right of the young man to privacy against the right of
the woman to walk safely in the streets. A more defensible question is:
how can social scientists gather the data which we so desperately need,
the basic information for the prevention and correction of violent
behavior, with proper consideration for the right to privacy?”

That should be language Congress can understand. If you
think rapists and crime in the streets have been too much abused, look
at it as a question of whether we should guarantee absolutely the right
of the potentially destructive authoritarian against a confrontation
with his own personality, or whether we should give some weight to
developing means to prevent the manning of more gas chambers and
concentration camps. Or would the moral absolutists still bar the
psychologist from research on such problems, and trust their own moral
indignation to keep the next six million away from the cyanide showers?

I am not here advancing the
you-can't-make-an-omelette-withoutbreaking-eggs line. Omelettes aren't
necessary foodstuff and human personalities are not eggs for the
breaking. But psychologists do have important work to do; human
behavior must be understood, if man himself is to survive in any
dignity; and I do not see that anyone has any clear right to
noninterference with his private person as long as the psychologist
takes full care to do the minimum of probing and influencing necessary
for his investigations, and to maintain the psychological health of his
research participants.

Not only can one justify imposing certain unpleasant
experiences on psychological research participants; one might even
argue that the experience these people undergo can sometimes be a moral
good in itself. As I've noted, Milgram did not falsely attribute any
despicable qualities to his volunteers, as has occurred in a few
studies. It happens to be quite true that the obedient volunteers were
willing to shock innocent human beings upon command, and each volunteer
proved this to himself. Should we instead leave people to their moral
inertia, or their grave moral laxity, so as not to disturb their
privacy? Who is willing to justify privacy on this basis? Who would
have done so, with foreknowledge of the results, in pre-Nazi Germany?
Do we not try to wake our friends, our students, our followers or
leaders from moral sloth when it becomes apparent, and are we bound to
use our weakest appeals when we do so? Who now condemns the Old
Testament prophets for having tried to arouse people to the evil within
themselves? Milgram doesn't claim prophetic stature, but his
experiments may similarly awaken some of the people involved. It's true
that these people didn't ask to be shown their sinful tendencies; but
people rarely do. That's why ministers lure people with church social
functions, why writers clothe their hard moral lessons in pretty words
and stories, why concerned artists blend morality and estheticism:
because people prefer not to face the truth about themselves if they
can avoid it. I have heard the other side of this argument, come to
think of it: the argument that a certain group of people doesn't want
to be educated, that maybe they'd prefer to remain in happy ignorance,
and therefore should be left to their familiar pattern of life. Yassuh,
massa.

The thrust of such arguments in Milgram's case is that
he was simply too effective in bringing volunteers into dramatic
confrontation with their own conflicting moral trends and their own
weaknesses. We don't hear the same complaints about other psychological
studies, or about most public speakers or writers or teachers or
preachers, because they seldom move their audiences enough to make
complaints worthwhile. Plenty of ministers, I am sure, would be
ecstatic over the possibility of giving their congregations such a
harrowing contact with their own immoral inclinations as Milgram has
done, and would feel the process producing this experience to be truly
heaven-sent. (In fact, one doctor of divinity who was a research
volunteer asked Milgram afterwards whether he would put some of the
good reverend's divinity students through the procedure, and let the
good reverend in on the results. Milgram, feeling a bit of doubt as to
the ethics of such a procedure, said no.)

The Beatles once sang, "I'd love to turn you on."
Thousands of moral advocates would love to turn their own audiences
really on, at least for a few moments. Milgram has done just that,
though most of his volunteers seem to have possessed sufficiently firm
psychological defenses to backslide into their old ways again soon
after. I wouldn't contend that the obedience studies are justified
by such self-revelations as I've been describing. I am arguing that the
studies' justification in terms of adding to our knowledge of
authoritarian behavior and destructive obedience is not invalidated by
any taint of questionable ethics through the induction of such
self-revelations.

Further, it's impossible to avoid upsetting someone,
lowering someone's self-esteem, sooner or later, if you do any
significant research and publicize it. I didn't tell my rightist
volunteers in Dallas what I thought of the bases for their political
activity. But when they read this book, as I hope some will, they may
feel a bit less self-esteem at finding they're either projecting inner
conflicts or easing their social relationships or just getting their
kicks out of rightist activity, instead of doing it because it's the
most rational position around. Diana Baumrind is going to lower at
least a few parent volunteers' self-esteem, when her conclusions that
their childraising techniques produce personal characteristics not
valued by our culture eventually filter out into the popular press.
Some psychologists seem to hope their research can continue in a
vacuum, can be bound up forever in the small-print journals and thus
never help or hurt anyone, so that they needn't consider whether it's
moral to do such research or not. They need to examine the ethical
implications not only of their research, but of their wish to keep it
as private knowledge.

Any research influences its participants, and some would
not choose that influence. I've done research in which I tried to
persuade people to stop smoking, and I've never heard any criticism of
it on ethical grounds. But obviously it could so be criticized; it
involves tampering with people's opinions when they don't necessarily
want to be tampered with. I do generally try not to change anyone's
behavior except through rational appeals, through overcoming
psychological defenses which themselves are ultimately harmful; and the
same could be said for Milgram's studies. But we might still get
arguments on the morality of it all, from the tobacco companies if
nowhere else. Any worthwhile research must influence its audiences,
both the primary audience of participants and the secondary audiences
that get the information through mass media, teachers, and community
leaders - though again, even among the secondary audiences, some would
just as soon not be influenced. Influence itself is neither moral nor
immoral; it is a vehicle for ideas and feelings, and the content rather
than the vehicle is what should be judged. In the case of Milgram's
studies, I cannot see that the content of the influence, insofar as it
got across, was anything but supremely moral.

THE ISSUE OF ULTIMATE VALUE

Baumrind finally comes down to arguing that although
certain ethically ambiguous actions may sometimes be justified (as in
medical research "at points of breakthrough," where harm to volunteers
could be outweighed by benefits to humanity), no
psychological experiments are of sufficient worth to warrant the
slightest ethical risk. Although she agrees that Milgram's research
deals with an important topic, she sees his methods as trivializing it:
the psychological laboratory and Yale University's prestige together
induce such high levels and unique patterns of obedience that the
results are in no sense generalizable. We've dealt with this sort of
argument before, pointing out that other volunteers were almost equally
obedient in a non-university setting with a minimum of prestige, and
that anyway many other institutions in our society have the potential
for inducing at least as much obedience as Yale and its psychologists
can. Further, our future obedience in contravention of ethical
standards may be more and more commanded by appeals based on respect
not for the traditional authorities, but for the authority of science
and technology: obey, so that society can cope with the population
explosion, the expansion of the cities, the shortcomings of the gene
pool. Studies of obedience to scientific authority may be even more
useful in the long run than studies of obedience to governmental
authority.

So maybe a good word can be said for the value of
Milgram's research. But what of the broader position advanced by
Baumrind (who is mainly a clinician rather than an experimentalist)
– the idea that psychological experimentation as a whole is so
worthless that its value can be counted zero in any moral equation?

Psychologists are often inclined to exaggerate the
immediate importance of their work, particularly when applying for
research grants. But this entire book is an argument for the ultimate
significance of experimental social psychology and related empirical
work. Only if we confine ourselves to piddling trivialities that
affront no one's moral sensibilities in the slightest, are we likely to
fail to influence the development of human civilization in radical
ways. Obedience to authority, for instance, is only one aspect of
social psychological efforts to understand the conditions of human
freedom and control. The whole area of experimental persuasion is
crucial here too, and discoveries in this area could be potentially as
dangerous, or more so, than the ultimate nuclear weapon. People can't
be held down by fear of destruction forever; but a really smoothly
persuaded person likes having been persuaded, so why should he ever rebel?

Such possibilities raise all the problems the physicists
have faced: "value-free science," cooperation with governments,
individual freedom to pursue or not to pursue a potentially
destructive/beneficial line of research. Social psychologists have not
yet actually devised the principles or methods that would allow them to
wreak vast changes upon society; they haven't yet gotten their fingers
burned seriously, as the nuclear scientists did in the blasts of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So most psychologists have hardly begun to work
through the moral implications of their research. Even the most serious
and responsible among them, such as Herbert Kelman, have so far come up
mostly with very limited and tentative formulations. Of those who do
announce their concern, too many seem to play around with problems of
good and evil mainly to raise their own self-esteem. We must all look
at the moral implications of our field for weightier reasons than that;
and once we are looking, we must pay much more attention to the
problems of moral ambiguity, and to our individual and collective responsibilities as psychologists, than anyone in the field has paid so far.

We have our experts on response set and cognitive
inconsistency and small-group dynamics. It is time we began producing
our ethical experts as well. We don't rely merely on intuition to
decide whether our experimental results are statistically significant;
no more should we rely entirely on our moral intuition. We may
occasionally seek expert mathematical advice on our statistical
problems; and perhaps we should likewise look outside our field for
moral inspiration. But the religionists and the philosophers have their
own ethical hang-ups, so I'm afraid they'll be of no more than
peripheral use as expert consultants. The severe criticisms of
Milgram's morally important research for its presumed immorality
indicate that somebody
needs to straighten out our moral sense, or at least make it a good bit
less curvilinear than it is presently. And this somebody had better
start working on the problem now, before we really do have the ability
to get ourselves and mankind either out of the frying pan or into the
fire.